Interim Revisions
The Challenge
People responsible for documentation need to make quick updates available without waiting for the whole revision cycle of the document.
My Role
Lead Designer (member of the Product Core Team)
Contribution
User Research, Low and High-fidelity Prototyping, Interaction Flows, Validation and Feedback loop.
My Role
Lead Designer
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I led the design work for this feature of the product. I was involved in discovery sessions with both technical pilots and documentation specialists to understand why it's essential for them to find faster and more efficient ways to access the information that allows them to do their job safely.
I worked with the customer in ideation sessions; brainstorming and whiteboarding different ideas, using techniques such as user story mapping to stay focused on the user, uncover product features, help with estimation, expose potential risks and find team consensus.
I developed low and high-fidelity prototypes that were used to validate various solutions and I worked with the team to get feedback early and iterate our prototypes to best meet the needs of our users.
The Challenge
Speed without compromise
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There are certain types of documents in an organisation that require constant revision and updating to reflect new regulations, changes in procedures, new operation requirements and so on.
Typically, each revision follows a pre-defined process of update and review before it's ready to be published. Depending on the case, this process can take weeks or months. However, there are often situations in which urgent updates are needed and cannot be delayed.
Discovery
The orange juice scenario
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We carried out qualitative research to understand this common situation better. To help us relate we nicknamed this feature after the quirky example from one of our interviewees:
"A new manual had to be quickly edited and sent out to the crew because the pilots were drinking all the orange juice and there was none left for the first class passengers who were complaining of a bad experience."
This is a fun example, but other cases are safety critical. The relevant information needs to be available timely and accurately to ensure no incidents occur, and there's no time to wait for the whole document to be reviewed.
After the revision with the urgent changes had been sent out, we needed a way to merge those changes back into the draft in progress to make sure that the latest document is completely up to date.
Ideation
The Interim Revision and revision merge
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Here's when Interim revisions come into play.
Interim publishing allows users to make small changes to the last published version of the document while a much larger revision is still in the works, therefore, they can only be created from the last published version of the document, to ensure that the content has been reviewed and approved.
Initial sketches of how the merging process might work.
Once the interim revision has been published the editor can bring those changes into the ongoing draft through a merge process that allows them to see exactly what has changed in a clear stepped process. They can choose to incorporate the changes or reject them if they are no longer relevant.
Low-fidelity wireframes.
The result of some interesting discussions that informed the design of this feature.
The team realised early on that rendering the two documents at the same time would cause performance issues. Our workaround was to render the blocks of content before and after to give enough context without sacrificing performance.
High-fidelity wireframes of the merge interface.
Demo
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Conclusion
Learning and Iteration
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Since its development, we have made significant improvements in performance and removed some of the constrains we had at the start, allowing us to review the merging flow. We will also be able to apply this interaction for other types of merges. Eg, versions of documents from different origins.
From our user feedback we have learned that adding a strikethrough to the deleted content and including subtle animations would greatly help user's understanding of what is happening.
More on Aerodocs
Detailed examples of Aerodocs design work
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